Aust sends 13 to help hunt for mass destruction weapons

June 1 2003

A 13-member team of Australian defence and foreign affairs personnel will join the hunt for Iraq's elusive weapons of mass destruction (WMD).

The team will be part of the 1,300 member United States-led Iraq Survey Group, announced yesterday in Washington, which will comb the country searching for chemical and biological agents which have so far eluded US forces.

Australian Defence Force (ADF) spokesman Brigadier Mike Hannan said the Australian team comprised 12 ADF members and one person from the Department of Foreign Affairs.

It would be headed by Brigadier Steve Meakin and its members possessed special skills in intelligence analysis and weapons systems, including WMD.

Brigadier Hannan said those specialists would help the US members in surveying Iraq's numerous weapons systems, both conventional and WMD.");document.write("

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He said the job would involve more desk work than Indiana Jones-style searches of dusty caverns.

"We expect this could take a number of months," he told reporters.

"Much of the work will have to be done through a detailed investigation of records, following up research programs, interviewing individuals and so on."

"This unit was set up as a very deliberate investigation of the full status of the weapons within Iraq. There is nothing last gasp about it. It has always been part of the coalition plans."

Defence Minister Robert Hill said he did not know if the "smoking guns" - unequivocal evidence of Iraq's possession of WMD - could ever be found.

"We are certainly already finding evidence. Whether these so-called smoking guns as such can be found I don't know," he said in comments to a security conference in Singapore.

"We're only at the stage now of interviewing the various scientists and they've still got many hundreds of sites to explore.

"I have no doubt at all that the picture at the end of this process will be of somebody who believed in weapons of mass destruction as a strategic tool, had weapons of mass destruction and was clearly prepared to use them."

Senator Hill said there were still some hundreds of sites that had not been properly worked over.

A key objective was to get the full picture of the extent of Iraq's weapons programs, he said.

"We obviously knew a certain amount before the conflict in terms of what Iraq had acknowledged, in terms of what the UN inspectors had said and in terms of what various intelligence organisations have assessed.

"Twelve years of effort by the United Nations demonstrated the threat was accepted and it was on the basis of that threat that there was intervention.

"The fact that there might ultimately be found to be a slightly different assessment of the extent of weaponisation and the extent of capability of those weapons to what had been predicted doesn't mean it wasn't the right thing to intervene."